The most free trade President?

Weak praise for G W Bush: he’s done bet­ter than oth­ers recent­ly, accord­ing to Claude Barfield—ex US Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Counsel—in the LA Times. Barfield makes only one direct com­par­i­son: with the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion that, as he says, was stymied by a hos­tile Con­gress’ refusal to pass the nego­ti­at­ing author­i­ty need­ed to launch a nego­ti­at­ing round (half of them were also try­ing to impeach Clin­ton, remem­ber?). But this was hard­ly the Admin­is­tra­tions’ doing. As for GW’s record: the arti­cle acknowl­edges there have been some neg­a­tives: the steel ‘safe­guards’ (Barfield for­gets that Bush also invoked “tex­tile safeguards”:http://www.inquit.com/article/116/what-the-textile-quotas-mean against Chi­na) and the huge increase in farm sub­si­dies. He might have added GWB’s spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure to get even close to his “num­ber one trade objective”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1288627.stm ear­ly in his first term, the Free Trade Area of the Amer­i­c­as. But it’s when he comes to list­ing the achieve­ments that I find Barfield’s list weak­est: bq. The U.S. took the lead in launch­ing the so-called Doha round of trade talks that began in Qatar in 2001 and has advanced bold mul­ti­lat­er­al lib­er­al­iza­tion pro­pos­als, such as elim­i­nat­ing indus­tri­al tar­iffs by 2015, elim­i­nat­ing agri­cul­tur­al exports sub­si­dies, cap­ping agri­cul­tur­al tar­iffs at 25% and dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduc­ing inter­nal crop sub­si­dies. (“LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barfield12sep12,1,6406750.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions) The launch of the Doha Round was delayed by the lack of US nego­ti­at­ing author­i­ty, so the USlead­er­ship role in it’s launch is debate­able. But I give the US cred­it for pur­su­ing the launch so soon after the ter­ror attacks of Sep­tem­ber 2001. It was among the few (the only?) imag­i­na­tive uses of mul­ti­lat­er­al coop­er­a­tion by the Bush admin­stra­tion to unite rather than divide it’s allies after the attacks. As for the oth­er ‘bold pro­pos­als’, that’s all they are, for the most part: pro­pos­als. In fact, the US dumped it’s bold agri­cul­ture pro­pos­al in the lead-up to the Can­cún meet­ing of WTO, set­tling instead with the EU for some­thing much weak­er that did not include the elim­i­na­tion of export subsidies[1]. It has engi­neered a means—still in the agri­cul­ture “frame­work text”:http://www.inquit.com/article/307/a-guide-to-the-wto-framework-agreement—to val­i­date it’s $19 bil­lion spend on “inter­nal crop sub­si­dies” by clas­si­fy­ing them as ‘blue box’ pay­ments that are not pro­hib­it­ed by WTO. As for indus­tri­al tar­iffs, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion made an even bold­er pro­pos­al in 2002—to elim­i­nate them—that was qui­et­ly buried soon after birth. This brings us to the ‘free trade agree­ments’ that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has nego­ti­at­ed with the Cen­tral Amer­i­can con­tries (Hon­duras, Guatemala etc), with Chile, Sin­ga­pore, Moroc­co and Aus­tralia. I think all of these small agree­ments prob­a­bly fall into the bet­ter than noth­ing cat­e­go­ry. None of them is tru­ly free trade; they all omit some­thing that proved too hard (sug­ar in the case of Aus­tralia). But they’re a hill of beans. They aren’t ini­tia­tives on the scale of the glob­al lead­er­ship that we could rea­son­ably expect from the Pres­i­dent of the world’s largest, most pro­duc­tive and, in many dif­fer­ent ways, most open econ­o­my. fn1. The terms of the pro­posed elim­i­na­tion of agri­cul­tur­al export sub­si­dies were final­ly “put on the table”:http://www.inquit.com/article/7/eu-offer-to-eliminate-export-subsidies by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion last June: not by the USA at all.

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher